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The Youth Café is proud to announce that our digital/media information literacy projects with African youth has won FIRST place in the 2020 UNESCO GLOBAL AWARDS. The award cements our goal to become a world leader in Media Information Literacy (MIL) and recognizes our extensive work on digital/media information literacy in the continent. The Youth Café has over the years undertaken projects and activities to further digital/media information literacy among the youth in Africa. In the recent past, The Youth Cafe implemented a media project aimed at cultivating youth power to advance media independence. We have trained and mentored a diverse mix of 1243 aspiring young leaders to produce 2378 powerful independent media content published on our "Perspectives" blog which is now on Google News and Apple News listing, thereby reaching over 300,000 readers monthly and helping to moderate contentious discourses about issues affecting the young people in some 22 African countries. Under these difficult times, we have organized webinars and podcasts training to help youths improve their working practices in digital security and media law and to understand their rights in challenges to freedom of expression. The Youth Cafe’s podcast is syndicated now on Apple Podcast, Anchor, and on Google. Under the MIL strand of work, The Youth Cafe seeks to equip young people with key media literacy skills: critical thinking, fact-checking, online safety, social media verification, and quality assessment of online information and their sources. These skills are important in restoring and consolidating democracy in states where digital tools and social media networks have been used to spread distorted narratives to shape public opinions. Conceived in a digital age where social media empowers propaganda, the project seeks to enhance young people's online civic citizenship in the face of targeted disinformation by building their analytical competencies to distinguish between facts from falsehoods. The aim is to build a culture of fact-checked youth-digital citizenship. Modeled around training, advocacy, and mentorship, we expect the participants of Media and Information Literacy for African Youth to be digitally literate citizens with the requisite capacity to evaluate the credibility of information shared on social platforms. This year's edition is quite special given the unprecedented situation surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic and the disinfodemic. Considering the increase demand for MIL and related actors the selection process was difficult. The Awards Committee selected 6 winners instead, recognizing the need to reward as many MIL related initiatives as possible noted Alton Grizzle, Programme Specialist at the Section for Media and Information Literacy and Media Development, Communication and Information Sector, UNESCO, Paris.
The winners are as follows: FIRST PLACE Michelle Ciulla Lipkin is the Executive Director of the National Association for Media Literacy Education. As Executive Director, Michelle has helped NAMLE grow to be the preeminent media literacy education association in the U.S. She launched the first-ever Media Literacy Week in the U.S. Willice Onyango, Executive Director at The Youth Cafe
SECOND PLACESam Wineburg is the Margaret Jacks Professor of Education and, by courtesy, of History & American Studies at Stanford University. Educated at Brown and Berkeley, he holds a doctorate in Psychological Studies in Education from Stanford and an honorary doctorate from Sweden's Umeå University. Silvia Bacher is a journalist specialized in the intersections of culture and education. She was awarded first prize by the University of Buenos Aires for education reporting. She has a Master in Communication and Culture (Universidad de Buenos Aires). Currently, she hosts shows on National Radio and Radio Splendid. Silvia is an expert in the field of education, communication, and youth culture in the digital environment.
THIRD PLACECarlos Lima, Coordinator at the Nucleus of Educommunication (Municipal Secretary of Education of São Paulo) for 15 years. Radialist and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab fellow, winner of the Creative Learning Challenge Brazil and of Mariazinha Fusari Educommunication Prize (ECA-USP). Holds a specialist title by The School of Communication and Arts of University of São Paulo (ECA-USP) in Educommunication. Creator of Imprensa Jovem (Youth Press) Syed Ommer is an award-winning social entrepreneur chasing a vision of 'putting a book in every hand’. He is the founder of Daastan – a technology company that has enabled 7000+ global authors to publish more than 250 books in 25 genres and two languages. He has represented Pakistan in Vietnam, Thailand, and China as an official delegate for multiple social entrepreneurship programs organized by UNDP where he has won multiple awards for Pakistan.
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